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Canon and Epson Rebate Synergy!

Yeah, that title has me a little freaked out too.

If you’re looking to buy an Epson Stylus R1900 or an Epson Stylus R2880 and a current Canon D-SLR* you can get $450 back from Epson -so long as you purchase them together between August 1st, 2010 and August 31st, 2010.

For full terms and conditions, give us a ring at 1-800-726-5544 or check out the .pdf on in our Rebate Center.

*EOS 50 D, EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 7D, EOS Rebel T1i, EOS Rebel T2i, EOS Rebel XSi, EOS Rebel XS

The History Of Progress

As Nick suggested back here, and as I’ve been mentioning on Facebook and Twitter, we’re working on a new site design. We’re sure you’ve noticed the new blog design (and isn’t it pretty?), and if you subscribe to any of our newsletters you should have noticed yesterday that they now match the blog. Soon, the website proper will match as well, giving us a complete unified web identity for basically the first time ever. So, while I’ve been bad at doing continuous rolling upgrades, which makes it hard to keep snapshots of all the web versions, here’s a quick overview of the website since I’ve hired in to keep you distracted while I go back to working on the code for the new site.

First Photo Contest of This Decade Celebrates Last

We’ve got our new contest theme up over at our Monthly Photo Contest page, out first of the new decade. And, we decided to use it as an opportunity for you to show off your best work from the last ten years (or 5, of six months, however long you’ve been shooting, so long as you shot it by the end of December 31st, 2009). The theme is open otherwise, so don’t hold back because of subject. We want your best: your best exposed, best composed, most interesting or perfectly timed photos. We want the photos you still look at with pride. Send them on over, and if you win we’ll send you a 16×20″ print of your shot.

http://www.robertsimaging.com/sharephotos.jsp

Roberts Cleans Up Its Error Messages

In an attempt to communicate more clearly with you all over at Roberts Imaging I cleaned up our various info dialogs and errors to use a new more Web 2.0 styled set of message boxes. So, when you’re over there, you might see the following:

Blue boxes like this one are used for bits of information and details that are important to note but not usually sources of conflict or confusion. They’re just a friendly way of telling you a bit more about what’s going on.

This is a warning box. It’s like the box above, but urgent. In these boxes we’re telling you information that is actually pretty important to what you’re doing. Things like shipping policies, billing practices, hour changes, and other important bits of info will show up in these.

These boxes, not quite an error but different from a warning, are to let you know when things involving data input from you had an issue. These are for when you don’t fill out a form properly, so you can tell very quickly that what went wrong was just a validation error and not something with the site or your order.

This is a standard-issue error. This means that whatever you were trying to do couldn’t be done. These’ll show up if you try to do something with your account while no longer logged in, for example. Usually it means that something went wrong, but it’s at least fixable

This is the opposite of an error, obviously. If you see a green box like this one, it’s to tell you that whatever you were trying to do was finished successfully and that you can now rest easy.

And then there’s this beastie. If you’re seeing this error message, then something has gone really quite wrong. If you see this during an order, then not only did your order not get to us, but it was incapable of even being completed, and you’ll have to try again from the beginning or give us a call and we’ll see what we can do. It should be rare to see one of these, but if you do then there is probably little we can do for the error other than look into it, in the more immediate sense things are just caput, dead, fin, expired, kicked the bucket. And we apologize in advance should you ever hit one of these.

Raw Regains Ads, Attempts to Not Be Awful

Roberts Raw, trusted font of camera information and reliable source of questionable writing, isn’t entirely the altruistic endeavor it might superficially appear to be. Brace yourself, dear readers, this might come as a shock: part of its performance is evaluated on how it helps us survive as a company. There, I said it. Roberts Raw’s ongoing existence is dependent on Roberts Imaging continuing to be a successful online retailer.

I will give you all a moment to recover from your shock.

…

We good? Anyway, to help keep Raw running as the font of information and not the marketing sham we prefer it to be, we had to make a concession and we have brought advertising back. But, we have try to keep it responsible, you will now find two (rather stylish, if I have any say in it, and I do) banner ads embedded on the mainpage of the blog. And that’s it. We’re trying to be as chill about things as we can, obnoxious ads are not our way. So, if you loves you the Roberts Raw, or even if it’s just a strong like, show us the occasional support and click an ad, or go up there at the top of the page and click “shop online” and throw us some bones.

photoGooru Mock-Ups Getting Finalized

Hey all, photoGooru’s been delayed a bit by a few small fires, but it’s still coming and coming in a ‘sooner-than-later’ sorta way. Again, if you missed the press release, photoGooru is going to be our compliment to the Online Help Department, focusing on technical columns in friendly language to help people better understand the world of digital imaging. If you hadn’t noticed or haven’t voted yet, check the poll on the right to cast your vote for what content we need to prioritize.

In the meanwhile, here’re the mockups for what you can expect. Mind you, they’re tiny, but it’s something to show, right?

Cooliris implemented to massage your eyeballs with our Flickr

Did I say it was easy to embed Cooliris in a page? I did. Guess what, it’s not beneath our fearless webmaster use something sexy and free. Check our monthly photo contest page and our Flickr feed to see this slickery goodness.

If you want in-depth knowledge of how to do this head on over to the Cooliris developer forums or pester us (Derek) in the comments below.

You should also keep an eye on the Robert’s Raw footage videos on our Youtube channel. I hear rumblings from the webmaster implying that he’ll be feeding them into Cooliris as well. Ba-da-BING!

Olympus EP-1 Video Proving Difficult, Sony Alpha 230 Video Uploading

Whew. It’s the end of the day. For some reason, naturally, the audio on the EP-1 video once uploaded sounds rather similar to the Mothman communicating in morse code. The Sony Alpha 230 video (and we threw in the Alpha A330, too, and shot it with an E-P1 for even more fun) is uploading, and you’ll be able to check that on our YouTube in a moment, and I’ll post it here tomorrow morning.ew

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